As the U.S. eyes reopening, South Korea provides a cautionary tale.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/coronavirus-news-updates.html#link-1b11400e

SK has been doing really effective contact tracing and when they "opened up" they had an outbreak.

Thanks to that contact tracing...they were able to find that ONE PERSON was responsible for 27 infections.

Being "sorta careful" is like being sorta pregnant. Either you are or you're not

 

What...no comment?

 

Few want to discuss South Korea and I think there might be a subconscious inferiority complex at play. COVID proved that South Korea had the superior culture of civic responsibility and inversely its pretty much proving that America has one of the worst on the planet. Their response has been absolutely amazing and it was achieved through a near total alignment of communal interests on part of its citizenry.

But in America we had to struggle with the basics right from the start. We have to tell people to wash their hands and stay home when sick, we have to fight a constant barrage of medical myths and outright lies, we have to deal with jerks from coast to coast who believe they're on some patriotic crusade to resist tyrannical oppression when all they were asked to do was help contain the spread of a deadly infection.

We've all grown up believing America and Americans are the greatest and in this instance we've been proven dead wrong. I imagine, for some, that's a hard pill to swallow.

 

There's a kernel of truth in that but more importantly...SK used the WHO tests and almost immediately produced workable tests and tested aggressively. They did contact tracing so that clusters could be quickly identified and quarantined ..

And they STAYED home

We did none of that. We still aren't

 

We've tested more than the South Koreans, we're also bigger than South Korea. Here's an inconvenient fact: NO country has tested 100% of its population, not even close.

 

That is part of the policy of contact tracing.

Indeed, it can't be done to test everyone, but by checking with an initial infection, a limited number can be called and test and quarantine or just quarantine if have been in contact other infected individuals.

In 14 days or whatever, the infection threads die out.

The city or whatever is safer.

 

They tested HEAVILY..early

Negating the need to test everyone...obviously because they were able to contain the virus.

8,000 cases and 250 dead. They live in a densely populated country by the way

We tested virtually no one in those crucial early days

 

27 was an outbreak?

No one is tracing me. If you want to protect yourself, wear your mask and wash your hands and you won't get it. Why did those 27 not protect themselves?

 

Yes...it is...

Ignored it becomes a much bigger outbreak

SK does not ignore...they are dealing with this pandemic appropriately.
We are not

 

Because they had "opened up"...ya know the way you want to

 

Dealing with it better than UK, Italy, France and most other nations with at least some measurable travel to/from China. Countries with barely any travel having low numbers shouldn’t be surprising. And those early tests
were not deemed accurate enough. Our standards are higher for better or worse.
And besides it wasn’t just the tests. It was and still is the obedient, submissive culture of Asians. They normally don’t touch each other like we do so their general contact is already reduced. And their public transportation is kept much cleaner compared to the subways in NYC where the vast majority of cases are. Nothing we could have done will change that. You know who’s in charge of NYC subways don’t you? NOT anyone in DC. Local govts are in charge of keeping their respective cities clean. They don’t need orders from DC for that. Cuomo should have taken it upon himself to order strict policy to do that. He didn’t need approval from anyone in DC. But he like plenty of other Democrat leaders didn’t take the threat serious back in Jan and Feb when it was really spreading. Maybe they should have used all this hindsight you demand of certain other leadership? But then you would need to have bipartisan or at least some views that seem logical but you never seem to express those.

 

"South Korea has used data from surveillance cameras, cellphones and credit card transactions to map the social connections of suspected cases. Hong Kong issues detailed information each evening about every newly confirmed case. While Hong Kong doesn't give out the names of those infected, health officials release each person's age, gender, street address, medical symptoms — and often the exact location of where the person works. This allows other residents to determine if they might have been in contact with the infected individual."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...the-outbreak-without-shutting-everything-down
None of that is legal in the US, at least w/o a a warrant, and courts don't issue warrants for medical investigations.

"In response to MERS, South Korea rewrote much of its infectious-disease-prevention legislation. To expedite testing, it gave laboratories the green light to use unapproved diagnostic kits during a public-health emergency. To expand contact tracing, it gave health authorities warrantless access to CCTV footage and the geolocation data from the new patients’ phones. To increase transparency, the new laws required local governments to send prompt alerts, such as emergency texts, to disclose the recent whereabouts of new patients."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/whats-south-koreas-secret/611215/
None of that is legal in the US, at least w/o a a warrant, and courts don't issue warrants for medical investigations.

"After the 2015 MERS outbreak, South Korea developed new procedures and revised laws to enable more aggressive contact-tracing. The government was given the ability to access citizens’ credit card records, cellphone GPS data, bank records, and the wide-ranging network of security cameras.

During dangerous epidemics, authorities have warrantless access to the private data.

Once someone is confirmed with COVID-19, the government can retrace their movements and alert, notify, and if necessary, quarantine others who may have come into contact with them. Quarantined people are required to download a monitoring app that alerts authorities if they break isolation.

As South Koreans move about the country, they receive new geographically linked alerts about those who have been infected.

The granularity of the information is impressive, if not intimidating. An individual’s movements, purchases, and images can be minutely detailed, including whether they were wearing a mask or not at a given time."
https://www.heritage.org/asia/comme...des-lessons-good-and-bad-coronavirus-response
None of that is legal in the US, at least w/o a a warrant, and courts don't issue warrants for medical investigations.


Your complaint is the US did not take a series of actions that violate the law.

 

Ya know what IS legal though?

staying the **** HOME

TESTING

CONTACT TRACING

 

You touted S Korea's "solution" to CV-19, and complained that the US STILL has not adopted it, while not having any idea what it actually was, and that virtually all of it violates US law.
Good work.

 

Social isolation is key. They did it by force of law. We don't do that. We are supposedly smart enough to do it voluntarily. Obviously that's not the case and we are paying the price.

But we did ENOUGH social isolation that along with proper testing early on and contract tracing and quarantine...we could have gotten through this without 80,000 people dying. Unfortunately we had almost no testing early on....not enough still...and very little contact tracing

 

Better than some of the worst hit areas is hardly smething to brag about and oh...SOuth Korea had LOTS of travel interaction with China

They were accurate enough to make South Korea just about the most successful nation in regards to fighting this thing

 

So, not only do you complain that the US did not take a series of actions that violate the law, you admit that you know the US does does not - because it can not - take a series of actions that violates the law.

And thus, you have no rational basis for your criticism of Trump.

Thus has never stopped you in the past, of course.

 

By doing things you agree the US cannot legally do.